Now those are math problems - sudoku is logic - if you want to claim all logic is math, then fine.  But the numbers simply make it look like math.  If you use fruit the problem is the same.   Now I appreciate the exciting name given to the matrix - but being able to find the math in everything is a bit like the man with the hammer seeing a nail everywhere.  I would think that math usually involves relative values - not just organization based on kind.  Math is a language developed to describe reality - logic is slightly different, but is still basically a language too.  But this is all semantics really - but I still would certainly claim that someone with no math training could solve a sudoku.

On a lighter note, I use Safari for the same reasons as James Lileks, so I am clearly at least as much of a genius as he is.

Safari.  And I am, modesty aside, pretty good at puzzles - but word ones, not math - and sudoku is not math.

Finster - that is what I was thinking.  I would have been running like made.

ParisParamus - I believe liquefaction occurs when the ground (soil, dirt) is shaken and turns into basically liquid.  That isn't quite what seems to be happening in the video though. This looks more like sea water oozing and shooting up through the ground as it breaks apart.

He is reaching out to Brazil, a frequently neglected country.

Wow indeed.  Somehow seems more like fiction than reality.

Greg Norman

"Nobody told me" really is the defense of a five year-old. 'Not on my watch' is taking on a different meaning - he just isn't watching.  I think Obama is easily bored and never thought for a minute that external affairs would interfere with his domestic plans.  At least Hillary thought about the 3 a.m. call, unlike the Ambien President. 

Risky - I think you might have left out twisted!

Kenneth - to hear such %^#( spoken with a British accent turns my stomach.  What happened to my beautiful ancestral home? (rhetorical, obviously)

The dog ate it seems about the level of defence and I absolutely don't understand what is so difficult about producing a document which everyone else routinely produces.  That is, I agree completely.

Sorry for the "madman" line - poor choice of words perhaps when I am agreeing with the need to recognize and treat mental disorder - but that is clearly how he presented himself.

It is noticeable that if there is something wrong with your body, in general, it is met with sympathy and best wishes.  But if there is something wrong with your brain (as if it wasn't part of your physical system) it is treated with distaste and shame. To treat the body but not the mind is foolish.

We had a very similar shooting here in Ottawa many years ago, and the target was a popular sportscaster on a local channel.  The man who shot him was a schizophrenic who I believe had refused treatment.  We need desperately to lessen the "rights" of people who exhibit dangerous behaviours - aren't rights meant to stop at my nose, so to speak?  That poor girl living in terror in math class, focussed on escaping out the door from a madman, instead of worrying about quadratic equations.  How can her rights have been dwarfed by a red-faced, shaking, madman?  The cases are piling up that involve considerable warning ignored.

I was thinking the very same thing yesterday when I stumbled upon news of Algerian riots on the web - we are fed a very strange assortment of news stories here in North America.  My paranoid husband things we are being kept deliberately uninformed and distracted so as to be led more easily into fascism.  I am a not so sure it is very intentional - more a question of habit.

And as to Canada breaking up - I wish we would just go ahead and do it.  The rest of the country should have the legislative freedoms that Quebec has won from the federal government through years of threatening to leave.  Many Canadians are sick to death of their whining and massive transfer payments (they get more money back from the Federal government than their residents pay in federal income tax). Enforced bilingualism is nuts and very expensive for the rest of the country and really translating all of the federal governments work into French in Alberta is crazy.

But if Canada does separate, don't expect to read about it in the main-stream media. (Just kidding - we get the attention we deserve.)

Got to say I am a comforter lover - but there are many different qualities to be found.  We got one from Costco that is awesome - somehow never too hot or too cold.  But my husband has a down sleeping bag from his youth that could cook an egg - it simply makes you roast.  Opening the window is also key, and something we fight about still.  I am an open window person and hubby is not, but luckily the window in our bedroom is on my side of the bed and I am allowed a sliver even in winter.  But you don't get the weight with a comforter that you can with the old fashioned bed-spread, and it is hard to find blankets that don't make you itch, or if synthetic, make you sweat.  So I say high quality but not too much loft comforter, or the old-fashioned cotton blanket and quilt.

I have seen those silk sacks in catalogues and wondered about them - do you actually use yours?

A great idea - a thread per candidate would be really helpful, broken down by issue perhaps.

"Is their hope merely that we won't descend into financial catastrophe as long as they inject fed money?"

Bingo!

Why more water?  Or why do I always need to make the same resolutions year after year?